As Justin Trudeau’s guest on the prime minister’s flight to Armenia to attend the summit of la Francophonie — beginning Thursday in the capital city of Yerevan — François Legault was wheels-up late on Tuesday evening.

It was certainly a good opportunity for Legault and Trudeau to break the ice and get acquainted. Though they come at federal-provincial relations from different perspectives and interests, no file is more important on either leader’s desk. Managing the federation is a top priority for any prime minister. Asserting Quebec’s role in it is a test of any Quebec premier.

Among other things they could have discussed is climate change, and the UN’s dire forecast of disastrous global warming released over the long weekend. While other provinces led by Ontario’s new Conservative government are bailing on Trudeau’s proposed carbon tax, there’s no market in Quebec for quitting its cap-and-trade regime, an environmental success story supported by all parties in the national assembly.

Trudeau might have had a word with Legault about his campaign proposal to reduce immigrants to Quebec by 20 per cent — to 40,000 people per year — while expelling those who weren’t fluent in French after three years. Among other things, the prospering Quebec economy has a labour shortage.

And as Legault discovered to his embarrassment in the campaign, while the selection of immigrants is a shared jurisdiction, deporting them is an exclusive prerogative of the feds. For his part, Legault may have pressed Trudeau on the flow of illegal immigrants streaming into Quebec at irregular crossings from New York and Vermont, and the cost of domiciling them.

Trudeau wouldn’t have needed to repeat the hope he expressed last week that Legault not invoke the notwithstanding clause, Section 33 of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, to override the fundamental freedoms of conscience and religion in Section 2 to prevent provincial and municipal public employees from wearing crosses, kippahs and niqabs on the job.

Asked about this at his post-election news conference last week, Legault said he wouldn’t rule it out, sparking angry protests from veiled Muslim women over the weekend. Demonstrations against intolerance are the last thing Legault needs, even before he takes office next Thursday.

Legault may also have asked Trudeau about the amount of compensation to Quebec dairy farmers for Canada giving the United States a 3.6 per cent share of the Canadian market, which U.S. President Donald Trump described last week as his “deal-breaker” in the NAFTA renegotiation talks.

While the supply-management system will remain for dairy, eggs and poultry, the question is how much Canada’s 11,000 dairy farmers, about half of them in Quebec, will receive for giving up even a small share of their protected market. Foreign Affairs Minister Chrystia Freeland promised they would be “fully compensated.” So what’s the number? The answer is “to be determined,” but it’s a small price to pay for retaining the cultural exemption and independent dispute-settlement mechanism, Canada’s deal-breakers.

Then Trudeau and Legault might have discussed the Quebec election, which most pollsters and aggregators got wrong. While they saw Legault’s Coalition Avenir Québec (CAQ) moving toward majority territory on the last weekend of the campaign, virtually no one (with the exception of Mainstreet Research) foresaw the size of the CAQ majority, or the weakness of the Liberal vote. “We have to do a better job,” pollster Jean-Marc Léger tweeted.

The pre-election polling consensus put the CAQ in a range of 30 to 33 per cent, with the Liberals between 28 and 30 per cent. In the event, the CAQ received 37 per cent of the popular vote, while the Liberals collapsed to 25 per cent, with the Parti Québécois (PQ) at 17 per cent and Québec solidaire (QS) at 16 per cent. Which gave the CAQ a strong majority of 74 seats in the 125-seat legislature, with the Liberals reduced to 32 seats, QS finishing third with 10 seats and the PQ winning only nine.

It was the first election in more than half a century not won by either the Liberals or the PQ; you’d have to go back to Daniel Johnson Sr. and the Union Nationale in 1966 to find that.

As Léger and others noted, the new parties, the CAQ and QS, won 53 per cent of the vote, while the old parties, the Liberals and PQ, won only 42 per cent combined.

The Liberals’ biggest problem was turnout: With sovereignty off the ballot, many lifelong Liberal voters stayed home. In the Liberal fortress riding of Westmount–St-Louis in Montreal, the turnout was only 48 per cent. In the Outaouais, a Liberal bastion, the CAQ won three out of the region’s five seats. In the cottage country riding of Gatineau, the turnout was only 57 per cent, allowing the CAQ to win the seat by 10 points. There was no ballot-box bonus, as Robert Bourassa used to call it, for the Liberals in this election.

Both Legault and Trudeau will long remember Oct. 1. On the same day Legault won his historic majority, Trudeau staked his own claim to history in announcing the new trade deal with the U.S. and Mexico.

All of which should have made for a very pleasant flight.

The views, opinions and positions expressed by all iPolitics columnists and contributors are the author’s alone. They do not inherently or expressly reflect the views, opinions and/or positions of iPolitics.

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L. Ian MacDonald is editor of Policy, the bi-monthly magazine of Canadian politics and public policy. He is the author of six books. He served as chief speechwriter to Prime Minister Brian Mulroney from 1985-88, and later as head of the public affairs division of the Canadian Embassy in Washington from 1992-94.